Portugal
Portugal's capital runs on pastéis de nata, Tram 28, and an energy that's hard to pin down until you've wandered the Alfama at dusk. It's a capital city with a small-town heartbeat, grand and walkable at the same time. Craft beer isn't the first thing Lisbon is known for, and that's fine. Look past the ginjinha bars and it's there, scattered around Chiado and Bairro Alto and clustered out in Marvila, the old industrial quarter that's quietly become the city's beer district.
A practical warning about the hills. Lisbon has them everywhere, and gravity is a one-way deal here. Walking downhill to a bar feels great, right up until you remember the bar is at the bottom and your bed is at the top. Check the elevation on your walking directions before you commit, and don't be too proud to call a Bolt for the climb home.
Here's a bit of history that shaped the whole place: the 1755 earthquake leveled much of the city, so the downtown got rebuilt on a deliberate grid. The result is an ancient city that's far easier to navigate than most old towns, where the streets actually behave themselves.
Hard to find, worth every wrong turn.
Filed from Lisbon — February 2026
Getting to Outro Lado Craft Beer is its own small adventure. Coming from Praça do Comércio, you leave a bustling street full of restaurants and look for a little blue sign above an arch. That arch leads to a passageway and a short climbing alley that doesn't look like it leads anywhere worth going. Then you're there.
Inside, the space is rustic and warm: tables and couches arranged across a split-level floor, the kind of room that feels right as soon as you sit down. Fourteen rotating taps line the bar, plus a good selection of cans and bottles, wine, and cocktails. There's another door on the other side of the bar that opens onto a different street, with patio seating of its own. Outro Lado means "the other side" in Portuguese. Maybe that's where the name came from!
On our first visit, I was surprised to find a beer from Perennial Artisan Ales on tap: one of our hometown breweries in St. Louis, poured on a quiet Lisbon evening in an alley I hadn't known existed an hour before. The bartender explained they try to import one Perennial beer each year as a celebration pour. I don't know how the two operations found each other, but it was one of those unexpected moments that makes traveling for beer worthwhile.
We had such a good time here on both visits that I didn't take many photos. That probably tells you everything you need to know.
One thing worth knowing before you go: Outro Lado is cash only. Multibanco (the Portuguese ATM network) is accepted, and there's an ATM a few minutes away if you need it. Don't let this catch you off guard.
Portuguese take on a Belgian icon.
Filed from Lisbon — February 2026
If you've ever been to the Delirium Village in Brussels, you know what you're getting: a sprawling, chaotic, joyful celebration of Belgian beer that draws visitors from around the world and at times resembles a very happy airport terminal. The little Delirium Café in Lisbon's Chiado neighborhood is a much smaller affair, up a flight of stairs and spread across a few connected areas, but it carries the same spirit, scaled to something more intimate and arguably more charming for it.
Of course, they have all the Delirium varieties (Tremens, Nocturnum, Red) plus a selection of taps that focuses primarily on Belgian beer. This is not a place hedging toward local craft; it's unabashedly Belgian in its loyalties, which is a perfectly reasonable position when your Belgian options are this good.
Before the crowds arrive and if the weather obliges, you might score a seat on one of the tiny balconies overlooking the street below. Watching the city move below you with a Tripel in hand is a genuinely pleasant way to spend an afternoon. It's the kind of small detail that makes a bar memorable long after the beers themselves have blurred together.